Teaching Materials

This project builds on the EUC funded "Muslims in Europe" research project conducted by Professor Ken Kollman and the group of researchers in Europe. A group of five teachers from three Ann Arbor high schools created a curriculum unit to examine the concept of European citizenship and religion in various countries. Each teacher wrote a part of the curriculum unit to be used in high schools. Covered topics: Ottoman heritage; European expansion/imperialism in Muslim areas; the post-war economic boom and resulting migration to Europe; diverse expressions of Islam; geography and Muslim populations; defining Europe and Europeans; social problems, economic situations, and political issues.

To download this curriculum unit please click here.The unit is also available on CD upon request. To request a CD please send e-mail to cesmichigan@umich.edu.

THE CONNECTING SEA: CHARTING THE MEDITERRANEAN ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Few world regions concentrate in themselves so many of today's most pressing geopolitical issues as the Mediterranean. Long studied in a fragmented way, the Mediterranean is now being reinterpreted as a space of connections, exchanges, and contacts made possible by the sea, and as the stage for the possible emergence of new collective identities. In 2011 and 2012, the Center for European Studies—incollaboration with many units across the university—held a series of events highlighting the changing political and cultural landscape taking shape along the Mediterranean's shores. Migration processes across the Mediterranean have provided an especially topical focus. Anthropologists Marco Jacquemet, Liliana Suarez-Navaz, and Gregory Feldman, who have carried out both field work and theoretical reflection about migration and its consequences on both shores of the Mediterranean, helped us set the current anti-authoritarian revolts on the southern shores of the Mediterranean in a broader context. Lectures devoted to history of the Mediterranean were given by Peregrine Horden, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Pamela Ballinger, and Natalie Rothman. Art history is the focus of talks by Emine Fatvaci and Mary Roberts, and Gazmend Kapllani and Mehmet Yashin focused on literature. This series involved lectures, interdisciplinary workshops, library exhibitions, and film screenings. The series was part of LSA Theme Semesters on Water and Language.

Spain's Transition to Democracy

In conjunction with the Spanish presidency of the European Union, the University of Michigan's Center for European Studies-European Union Center (CES-EUC), in collaboration with the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED), devoted the winter semester of 2010 to exploring recent debates about the meanings of transition and memory in democratic Spain.

Since Francisco Franco's death in 1975, Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy, culminating in the country's full integration in the European Union, has been hailed in some quarters as a model transition for the countries of Eastern Europe and Latin America. The political, juridical, and cultural composition of Spain's transition, still up for debate 35 years after its inception, has attracted the interest of the Spanish public and scholars of history, political science, and cultural studies. The Conversations on Europe series attempted to place Spain’s experience in a broad conceptual and comparative framework and to explore how the transition to democracy has affected both the construction of historical discourses and the experience of the present. Included in the discussions are the historical, political, and cultural tensions underlying the controversial laws of historical memory, recently approved by the Spanish parliament; the juridical and political status of "the disappeared"; and the language of disagreement between "Left" and "Right" in contemporary Spain.

Goethe-Institut Transatlantic Outreach Program (TOP) - TOP aims to enhance the quality of classroom teaching about Germany today by developing and disseminating teaching materials about modern Germany to K-12 social studies educators and social studies methods professors at the university level and by organizing study/travel tours to Germany.